Unaccustomed Earth

One sentence synopsis... Eight stories - some interwoven, most not - of people transplanted from their homes and setting down new roots in foreign environments.

Read it if you like... Jane Austen - for the forensic precision into family habits, customs, and pressures with love versus arranged marriage plots.

Further reading... anything by Lahiri. She circles the same themes of the immigrant experience and family disconnect between generations in every book but every time gets closer and closer to literary perfection.

Unaccustomed Earth is Lahiri's third book, with two collections of short stories and one novel. She seems to know the immigrant experience, the loneliness, the out-of-sync feeling with the rest of the world. Her characters try to form new bonds and try to change to fit the new world in which they are living. The title comes from a Hawthorne quote that promotes the benefits moving into new soil, both for plants and for people. These benefits are subtle in the stories presented here and only occur after an initial crisis of transplanting takes place.

Her craft is mainly with her character development, but the entire collection seemed redundant. The stories all ended differently but in the same style - cut short and open-ended with some sort of ironic twist. One of my favorite things about the book was the opening passage from “The Custom House,” the first chapter in The Scarlet Letter, that has the phrase “unaccustomed earth” in it. The quote gave the stories, as a collection, a thematic unity that was nice.

For the most part, I didn't enjoy this book much. I have a soft spot for Indian-influenced fiction - whether it is based in India or elsewhere with Indian characters - but for me this fiction was light on interest and heavy on emotion. This is the same way I felt about the highly acclaimed Interpreter of Maladies.

This is not eight stories, as the blurb on the back says. It is split into two parts - part one contains five short stories - each quite independent but all of a theme - generally about first or second generation Indian families living (mostly) in the USA and dealing with the cultural differences, and adapting to an environment different to India. There are variances, some are younger characters distancing themselves from their families, others about dealing with the weight of tradition.
There was nothing wrong with these stories, they were articulate and well constructed. They just were not very interesting. They told stories that seemed very realistic and perhaps, I guess, just not out of the ordinary. If their purpose was to demonstrate some of the difficulties in assimilation, then it achieves this in fairly low key way.

Perhaps, and quite likely I am not the target market for this book. There was not enough happening for me.

Which brings us to part two of the book. This stands alone, more like a novella of three chapters.
This story saved the book for me, as finally we had something a bit more off-beat, and interesting.

Without going much away, we first have a chapter from Hema, written as though she is speaking to Kaushik - these being the primary characters.

Hema outlines the family history and explains her crush on Kaushik when he and his parents came to stay with her as a young girl living with her parents in the USA. Having lived in the USA Kaushik's family had been living back in India and were now returning to the USA, and they stayed with Hema's parents while they found a house.
We then have a chapter from Kaushik which sort of picks up from the end of Hema's timeline and talks about the changes in his family (no spoilers, ha), and his life up to adulthood. This chapter is not written to Hema, but still in the first person.
The third chapter is shared between the two as they meet again in a foreign country, and the events which go on to reach the conclusion.

I enjoyed this novella, and had it been published alone, I would have given it four stars.

Overall however, I expected more from the “New York Times best Book of the Year”.
Three stars.